A Republican, a Democrat and the ACLU Walk into a Bogus Lawsuit

On Monday, a lawsuit that was brought by Representative Neal Kurk (Republican) and Senator Bette Laskey (Democrat), along with the ACLU of New Hampshire, was dropped. The lawsuit was brought to stop Secretary of State Bill Gardner from handing over publicly available voter database information to President Trump’s Election Commission.

New Hampshire already shares this information with 27 other states and as a result, there have been almost 95,000 duplicate voters registered in both the Granite State and other states with the majority of this number being dually registered in Massachusetts.

Best Practice: States should join interstate programs that share data and synchronize voter lists so that states, on their own initiative, come as close as possible to creating an accurate database of all eligible voters.

28 states are already sharing voter database information and have been doing so for years. “The project – Interstate Crosscheck – was spearheaded about 12 years ago by Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, in an effort to get states comparing registration lists in order to eliminate duplicate registrations and dampen potential voter fraud,” according to The Patch.

It’s something Obama’s Election Commission agreed with and something Trump’s Election Commission is trying to put into practice but there was no lawsuit from the ACLU when New Hampshire started sharing this information with other states. Why? Because it’s written into New Hampshire law that it can be done: From RSA 654:45:

The secretary of state may enter into an agreement to share voter information or data from the statewide centralized voter registration database for the purpose of comparing duplicate voter information with other states or groups of states. The secretary of state shall only provide information that is necessary for matching duplicate voter information with other states and shall take precautions to make sure that information in the database is secure in a manner consistent with RSA 654:45, VI. The secretary of state may solicit input from the department of safety and the department of information technology and shall ensure that any information or data shared between the agencies that is of a confidential nature remains confidential.

So, why the bogus lawsuit from Kurk, Laskey and the ACLU? Politics. They are playing political games to pretend the Trump Administration is asking for something they don’t already have access to. Not only was the lawsuit a waste of taxpayer money but they lied to Granite Staters throughout the entire campaign against Bill Gardner by claiming the information was private, it’s not.

Political Games

Gardner stuck a pacifier in their mouths by making a deal that he wouldn’t provide the publicly available information via a digital copy but this just wastes even more taxpayer dollars. Technology has come a long way and there are software programs that can easily turn scanned documents into spreadsheets with the click of a button. Taxpayers will have to spend money for someone to scan the database and then transfer it into searchable digital format. Of course, Kurk, Laskey and the ACLU will continue to lie that they are only allowing “unsearchable” data.

The reality is, they would have lost their lawsuit. Gardner should have let it go forward and allow them to be humiliated even more than they have been but he didn’t. Gardner, who sits on the commission, seemed a bit disgusted with the ACLU’s behavior and bogus claims:

For the ACLU to argue, without justification, that this office would seek to harm the voting public by disclosing historic voter information only served to unnecessarily undermine voter confidence and frustrate the positive and trustworthy impression our office tries to give the voters of New Hampshire.

Not only did this bogus lawsuit waste valuable taxpayer dollars but it has shown that the ACLU seems more interested in pushing left-wing politics, all while lying to Granite Staters along with the New Hampshire Democrat Party, Neal Kurk and Bette Laskey.